Ancient Chinese curse: may you live in interesting times. This web site is my attempt to document, from my perspective, these "interesting times".

Thursday, December 09, 2004

TOTAL THERMONUCLEAR WAR WIPING OUT ALL HUMANITY!!!

Josh Marshall, a self-professed liberal hawk, weighs in on Beinert's article
(link).
I won't quote it extensively (read it yourself, please), but Josh gets to a key
point when he points out the uncomfortable (for some) truth that the threat of
Islamic terrorism is just not of the same degree as the threat of Soviet
communism:

Let’s survey the world stage the ADA folks faced in 1947 for some points
of comparison. Having vanquished fascism, the democratic world faced in world
communism a political movement that in its basic hostility to democracy and
liberalism was more similar to than opposed to fascism. Russia, half of Europe
and (in a couple of years) China were all communist. The communists controlled
the largest land army in the world and would soon have nuclear weapons.
Communism had substantial minority support across Western Europe, including
vast support (active or passive) among the most articulate in society. And in
the United States many on the left saw communists less as enemies than as
errant allies, with whom cooperation was possible on common goals.

Placing context or limits on the danger posed by Islamic terrorism is a
hazardous business these days. But unlike communism in 1947, militant Islam
simply does not pose an existential threat to our civilization. It just
doesn’t. It puts us all physically at risk. And especially for those of us
who live in DC, New York or other major urban areas, it could kill us
tomorrow.

But aside from middle eastern immigrants in western countries, this
ideology has close to no support anywhere outside the Muslim world. As an
ideology it controls at best a few small states; and it has possible access to
Pakistan's small nuclear arsenal. But where is the danger of the Islamist
takeover of any of the world’s great powers? China? The US? Europe? India?
Japan? Brazil? Will Germany or Canada becomes ‘finlandized’ by Islamist
power? That doesn’t mean the danger doesn’t exist, only that it’s
different. And those are fundamental differences we shouldn’t ignore.

Admittedly, the lack of Islamist power, in this sense, will be cold comfort
for many of us if al Qaida brings us cargo ship with a nuclear weapon into New
York harbor tomorrow. But the difference between an existential threat and a
physical one is an important one for thinking about its impact on our
politics. Particularly, whether it should lead us to purge folks from the
Democratic party or from American liberalism who haven’t yet come around yet
to a sufficiently serious view of the threat of terrorism or a coherent and
tough-minded national security policy.

As much as people fear the threat of terrorism, that fear, for me at least,
comes nowhere close to the fear of TOTAL THERMONUCLEAR WAR WIPING OUT ALL OF
HUMANITY that was a constant fact of life during the Cold War. I only came
into this world in the latter stages of that conflict, but I can remember
sleepless nights during the Reagan years when I lay in bed straining to hear the
sound of Russian bombers coming over the horizon. As bad as the destruction of a
single city in a terrorist nuclear attack would be, it still doesn't compare to
the threat of TOTAL THERMONUCLEAR WAR WIPING OUT ALL OF HUMANITY.

When people like Beinert question our commitment to fighting terrorism
because we don't treat it as a threat equivalent to TOTAL THERMONUCLEAR WAR
WIPING OUT ALL HUMANITY (last time, I promise) then I have to wonder where his
sense of proportion has gone.

Josh covers a lot of other points, not the least being that organizations
like MoveOn are not comparable to the communist fellow-travelers of the 1940s
(ANSWER is a different matter) and may be the greatest hope we have for a
progressive renaissance in this country. Purging the group as a whole would be
foolish.

Aside: I have to wonder what the impact on the future will be as our
population shifts towards a demographic that has never leaved under the fear of
... okay okay, I promised I wouldn't do it again. Still, the impact of that
global existential fear on our psyches as children couldn't help but shape the
way our minds work. The lack of that fear must be having a similar titanic
impact on the thinking of the next generation.